| If people are discovering the joys of physical media, it’s partly because there’s something ephemeral about streaming culture, where any music you 'have' is at the mercy of corporate whims. A couple of years ago, MySpace accidentally erased all the music ever uploaded to the site, with one push of a button. Your photos are probably next. |
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| If I Ruled the World: Nas in 1996. |
| (Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“If people are discovering the joys of physical media, it’s partly because there’s something ephemeral about streaming culture, where any music you 'have' is at the mercy of corporate whims. A couple of years ago, MySpace accidentally erased all the music ever uploaded to the site, with one push of a button. Your photos are probably next.”
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- Rob Sheffield, "Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here"
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| rantnrave:// |
NFT State of Mind
For prices ranging from $50 to $9,999, you can buy an NFT, starting today, that will give you a small share in future streaming royalties from the sound recordings of either of two recent NAS album tracks, via the NFT marketplace ROYAL. Let it be known there are at least five noteworthy qualifiers in that sentence ("small," "future," "streaming," "sound recordings," "recent"), and all sorts of additional qualifiers in the legal notice detailing the offering. You won't make your $50 back from that 0.0143% piece of Nas' label's share of the streaming income from "ULTRA BLACK," nor will you make your $9,999 back from that 1.5789% piece of "RARE." Not for a very very long time anyway. Forever stamps would be a better investment.
And yet there are legit reasons you might want to buy them anyway, depending on how much of a fan / speculator / early adopter you are. Thank you, TRAPITAL's DAN RUNCIE, for this reasonably simple explainer of what this is all about and who might be interested. What's really for sale, Runcie suggests, are the tokens themselves, collectibles that can give fans a sense of a tangible connection to the artist, while presenting speculators with the chance that the tokens will increase in value—separate from the underlying intellectual property they represent—because of their uniqueness and rarity. Buyers get some fan-club-like perks, too. Runcie sees the Royal platform, which was founded by DJ/producer 3LAU, as the fun/sexy way to invest in song royalties, and though he doesn't quite put it this way, fun/sexy in this case might mean not really investing in song royalties at all. Come for the 0.0143 percent; stay for the irony. You may yet get rich, young investor.
New Oldies
For anyone interested in the more expensive and lucrative side of the music investment market, the side where $9,999 might not be enough to pay the lunch bill, the Wall Street Journal's ANNE STEELE interviews BARRY MASSARSKY and NARI MATSUURA, whose MASSARSKY CONSULTING (recently acquired by professional services firm CITRIN COOPERMAN) advises major investors on the value of music catalogs. They're "The Calculators Behind the Music-Catalog Megadeals" (paywall). Matsuura tells Steele music is a remarkably stable asset that "almost functions like a bond because you’re getting a regular and predictable cash flow." (Artists and songwriters may note some irony here as well.) Massarsky says investors are looking for "standards," by which he means, "’60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s. Maybe early 2000s. They have stood the test of time."
Disc-y Business
This is a good piece by Rolling Stone's ROB SHEFFIELD on the surprising allure of the least sexy of all music formats: CDs. "Less glamorous than vinyl, less cool, less tactile, less sexy, less magical... But CDs work. They just do. You pop in the disc, press play, music booms out." And unlike streaming music, they're not in perpetual danger of disappearing, whether at the whim of a corporation or the errant push of an engineer's button.
Sheffield's piece is pegged to figures showing that CD sales increased in 2021 for the first time in 17 years, which is a misleading stat. A year earlier, during the first year of the pandemic, the already-declining CD market completely nosedived. Sales picked up a little in 2021, but the longterm trend is still a downhill slope. But that doesn't change Sheffield's larger point, which is that there's much to appreciate about this oft-unappreciated corner of a lot of people's collections, which may or may not be packed up in boxes in the back of the basement. It's never too late to dig them back out, pop them in and press play. Assuming you still have a device that has that feature.
Rest in Peace
Country songwriter, producer and publishing exec JERRY CRUTCHFIELD, whose songs were recorded by Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, Glen Campbell, Linda Ronstadt and dozens of others... Quebec singer/songwriter KARIM OUELLET... HANA HORKA, a singer for the long-running Czech folk group Asonance, who deliberately exposed herself to Covid-19. She was an anti-vaxxer.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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Culture Notes of an Honest Broker |
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| Is Old Music Killing New Music? |
| By Ted Gioia |
| All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs-with consumption of new music actually shrinking. How did we get here, and is there a way back? |
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Vulture |
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| Behold the Indie K-pop Star |
| By Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan |
| With his new album "There and Back Again," Eric Nam searches for footing outside the industry machine. |
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The Bitter Southerner |
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| Yola at Home |
| By C.H. Hooks |
| The pandemic forced U.K.-born artist Yola to move closer to her recording studio in Nashville. Now, with a Grammy nomination for her latest album, “Stand for Myself,” and a role in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming movie “Elvis,” she’s making a name for herself on the global stage. |
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MTV News |
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| Hikaru Utada Looks Into The Mirror |
| By Erica Russell |
| The J-pop superstar on the beauty of self-reflection, their first bilingual album 'Bad Mode,' and feeling like an outsider. |
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Stereogum |
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| Cordae And The Prestige-Rap Problem |
| By Tom Breihan |
| Cordae is a good rapper. Cordae has always been a good rapper. But recently he’s channeled all that good rapping into securing a permanent place on awards-show nomination lists. |
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KEXP |
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| Bonobo Finds Musical Inspiration From Samples and Synths |
| By Emily Fox and Bonobo |
| Bonobo's most recent full-length album, "Fragments," came out on January 14. He talks with Emily Fox about the samples he used in the record, getting through his writer's block with the help of modular synths, and finding solace in nature on tour and during the pandemic. |
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The Tennessean |
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| Kenny Chesney sells music catalog to Hipgnosis Song Management |
| By Matthew Leimkuehler |
| In the first blockbuster deal to hit Music Row since artists began shipping catalog rights for mega-bucks in late 2020, superstar Kenny Chesney sold a majority of his royalties to British investment company Hipgnosis Song Management. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “Nas Is Like” |
| Nas |
| "They just rob your grave / I'd rather be alive and paid." From "I Am..." (1999) |
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| Music | Media |
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| “REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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